It measures the annual amount and impact of faculty scholarly work in several areas, including: The FSPI analysis creates, by academic field of study, a statistical score and a ranking based on the cumulative scoring of a program's faculty using these quantitative measures compared against national standards within the particular discipline.
It draws on the approach used by the United States National Research Council (NRC), which publishes a ranking of U.S.-based graduate programs approximately every ten years, but focuses on providing a more frequently-gathered set of benchmark measurements that do not include the qualitative and subjective reputation assessments favored by the NRC and other ranking systems.
During that period,[vague] a series of discipline-specific, per-capita regression models was created and tested to evaluate their accuracy and the feasibility of predicting the academic reputation of the faculty of doctoral programs.
Martin and Olejniczak found that the reputation of a program (as measured by faculty scholarly reputation from a survey conducted by the National Research Council) could be predicted well using a discipline-specific regression equation derived from quantitative, per capita data available for each program (the number of journal articles, citations, federally funded grants, and honorific awards).
The prototype materials based on this method, and the data from the 1995 NRC study, were subsequently presented at numerous academic conferences from 1996 to 2004, and have formed the basis on which the FSP Index was developed.